Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of
the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will
inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion.
The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling,
the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations
of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It
rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure.
Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of
that is how newness enters the world. It is the great
possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried
to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion,
change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.
(Rushdie, 1991, p. 394)

It is notoriously difficult to predict the future importance
of contemporary art works, since this depends not only upon internal
qualities but also upon the concerns of the future society which
will evaluate them. This allows more confidence than usual in
predicting the future importance of The Satanic Verses,
since it is not only an unusually ambitious and accomplished art
work in terms of traditional internal literary qualities, but
it also reflects and embodies lasting concerns. A brilliantly
written work about, say, the Cold War may be forgotten as we move
farther from that era and our interest shifts to hotter wars.
While political ideologies and conflicts, even those of superpowers,
may fade within decades, some things have greater staying power.
Communism is nearly gone, and capitalism and democracy could go
in our lifetimes, as well, but the gaps between faith and secularism,
between dark skins and light, between fact and fiction will be
with us for the foreseeable future. The Satanic Verses
not only treats such conflicts with exceptional insight and intelligence,
but, through the controversy which it has aroused, it is itself
a part of them.

Everyone has a different definition of postmodernism, and The
Satanic Verses, like most contemporary works, fits some and
not others. It meets, for instance, Linda Hutcheon's criterion
by being, in part, "historiographic metafiction" (1988,
p. 5), while it fails to meet Brian McHale's by failing to substitute
an ontological dominant for an epistemological (1987, p. 10).
We must, however, bear in mind McHale's proper insistence that
the term "postmodernism" is a provisional construction,
useful but always subject to change (1992, pp. 1-3). While theorists
argue over whether postmodernism is an extension or a rejection
of modernism, nearly everyone who uses the term agrees that it
must logically describe what follows modernism. Since The Satanic
Verses has itself changed our understanding of the function,
meaning, and significance of contemporary fiction, it is, almost
by definition, what follows modernism, and our definitions of
postmodernism must now accommodate themselves to this pathbreaking
work.

Some writers were able to see the lasting importance of The
Satanic Verses almost immediately. As early as 1991, Christine
Brooke-Rose placed Gibreel Farishta, one of Rushdie's two protagonists,
in another postmodernist novel, alongside the likes of Oliver
Twist and Emma Bovary, the Wife of Bath and Captain Ahab. In a
remarkably clear-sighted article published in 1989, barely a year
after Rushdie's novel, Mark Edmundson argued that The Satanic
Verses represented a major new strain of postmodernism, a
"new, positive postmodernism" (p. 62). I don't
think that we need to see earlier expressions of postmodernism
as exclusively negative (consider, for instance, "The Literature
of Replenishment" which John Barth had proclaimed nine years
earlier), but Edmundson was right to see The Satanic Verses
as a landmark case, in part because of the nature of its positive
perspective.

For all their differences, most of the major thinkers in postmodern
social theory agree that postmodernism stresses the particular-Lyotard's
petites histoires, Deleuze and Guattari's nomads, and so
on-as opposed to modernist generalizations and groupings. This
has been echoed in recent years with the breakup of such constructs
as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and with the supplanting of
the melting-pot metaphor by multiculturalism.

That focus on the particular is also, of course, a central
element of romanticism. The reading of cultural history as a series
of alternating classical and romantic periods, while obviously
an oversimplification with endless exceptions, is nevertheless
a useful oversimplification. In general, the classical eras stress
unity and assimilation: all people essentially alike, following
one set of rules, for art as well as for life. The romantic eras
embrace individualism. I read the modernism of the first half
of our century as an essentially classical episode, to which the
postmodernism of the second half has been a romantic reaction.
For all their differences, the great modernist works share some
fundamental aesthetic assumptions, not the least of which is a
striving for unity. The nearly unquestioned dominance of Leavisian
and New Critical approaches through mid-century, with their stress
on the integrity of the literary work, fit this literature well.
More recent writers have set off in a multitude of directions,
writing of many things in many ways, and criticism and theory
have become similarly fragmented.

Rushdie is, in many respects, a romantic. We see this in the
extravagance of his imaginative creations and the fervor of his
progressive political commitment, as well as in his postmodern
particularization, his opposition to "the absolutism of the
Pure" (1991, p. 394). It should, then, be no surprise to
find so many Coleridge allusions in Rushdie's work (especially
in Haroun and the Sea of Stories ), perhaps in part because
of the poet's famous doctrine of "multeïty in unity."
Postmodern thought, with its petites histoires, rhizomatics,
schizoanalysis, and so on, generally favors multeïty, and
the grandes histoires are explicitly assaulted by a character
at the end of The Satanic Verses (p. 537).

Even more to the point, William Blake's The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, that groundbreaking manifesto including so
many key Romantic ideas, lies literally and figuratively at the
center of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie, identifying it as
one of the "books that were most influential on the shape
this novel took," called it "the classic meditation
on the interpenetration of good and evil" (1991, p. 403).
Gibreel Farishta reads Blake's book on pp. 304-305, and it may
well be the best key to the novel's meaning. (Thomas Prasch has
noted a significant echo of Blake's Jerusalem in the novel,
as well [p. 314].) Like Blake, Rushdie insists upon the instability
of morality, and refuses to accept even Iago (alluded to more
than once) as pure malignity. Critics have noted "Rushdie's
overall assault on polar logic" (Booker, 1990, 987) and desire
"to break out of a manichean world" (Nazareth, 1990,
171), and these responses reflect Blake's. Rushdie strives to
break down "that Berlin Wall between the dreaming and waking
state" (1989, p. 347) and all such walls.

What has not been as clear to readers and critics is Rushdie's
complementary rejection of the logic of fragmentation. While an
American might expect a leftist Indian in Britain to embrace multiculturalism,
Rushdie rejects it right along with assimilation:

At first, we were told, the goal was 'integration'. Now this
word rapidly came to mean 'assimilation': a black man could only
become integrated when he started behaving like a white one. After
'integration' camethe concept of 'racial harmony'. Now
once again, this sounded virtuous and desirable, but what it meant
in practice was that blacks should be persuaded to live peaceably
with whites, in spite of all the injustices done to them every
day. The call for 'racial harmony' was simply an invitation to
shut up and smile while nothing was done about our grievances.
And now there's a new catchword: 'multiculturalism'. In our schools,
this means little more than teaching the kids a few bongo rhythms,
how to tie a sari and so forth. In the police training programme,
it means telling cadets that black people are so 'culturally different'
that they can't help making trouble. Multiculturalism is the latest
token gesture towards Britain's blacks, and it ought to be exposed,
like 'integration' and 'racial harmony', for the sham it is. (1991,
p. 137)

If neither assimilation nor multiculturalism, neither unity
nor separatism, then what? The answer is the "hybridity,
impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new
and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas,
politics, movies, songs" (Rushdie, 1991, p. 394). The central
metaphor of Haroun and the Sea of Stories presents the
timeless stories of mankind as currents in the sea, continuously
merging with other stories to bring newness into the world. Edmundson's
"new, positive postmodernism" (1989, p. 62) is
a turn from separatism to continuous blending.

Once again, The Satanic Verses embodies what it celebrates,
being itself a hybrid. One critic, armed with ample evidence,
rightly characterizes it as "profoundly Indian in the sensibility
it exports" (Aravamudan, 1989, p. 8), while another claims,
also with much justice, that "no writer in the past decade
has made more effective use of the Western literary tradition
than" Rushdie (Booker, 1991, p. 190).

In the world within The Satanic Verses, too, things
and people often change, cross boundaries, or blend. Still, even
in that world, an Indian such as Saladin Chamcha, the novel's
other protagonist, who wants to cross over into full Britishness,
can never manage it, even after years of professional success
in London. The strains of humanity, like the streams of story,
retain their character as they blend, bringing richness as well
as newness into the world. In the world outside the book, on the
other hand, impermeability proved to be intransigent. Khomeini
and his followers saw no breakdown of boundaries. In Rushdie's
next major novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, he has a mad villain
denounce "rubbish about unity in diversity," while the
largely sympathetic protagonist laments "the tragedy of multiplicity
destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One" and
pays tribute "to that most profound of our needs, to our
need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers"
(1995, pp. 412, 408, and 433).

In acknowledging that "racism is commonplace" in
India as well as in Britain, Rushdie says: "I've never been
one-dimensional about it" (quoted in Weatherby, 1990, p.
18). Indeed, he is not "one-dimensional" in any important
respect. Like Blake, he grasps and accepts the full complexity
of situations which it is easy to take for dichotomies: India/England,
Muslim/Hindu, realism/fantasy, and so on. This has not always
been true even of the most eminent modernists (e.g., Eliot and
Pound) or postmodernists (out of courtesy to the living, let's
say Beckett and Cortázar), classicists (Racine and Voltaire)
or romantics (Shelley and Byron).

It has been true of some extraordinarily incisive imaginations
(Blake and Joyce), and it is not surprising to find these writers'
works informing Rushdie's. M. Keith Booker demonstrates the connections
to Finnegans Wake [1990], and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
notes that "the echoes from The Portrait of the Artist
As a Young Man are a text for interpretation in themselves"
[1990, p. 44]. I might add that The Satanic Verses' allusions
to Joyce's "Telemachus" chapter of Ulysses, with
its highly relevant themes of betrayal, father-son conflict, and
colonialism, are also most interesting (1989, pp. 188 and 449).
The Ground Beneath Her Feet also features Ulysses
allusions, including a breathtaking twist on the famous culmination
of Molly Bloom's erotic soliloquy: "I put my arms around
him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all
perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes
I will Yes." Rushdie's photographer-narrator takes a roll
of film hidden in the boot heel of the stinking, decomposing corpse
of a murdered photographer: "I put an unused film in its
place from my own boot yes and I could feel his body all perfume
and my heart was going like mad and . . . I said yes because it
might as well be me as another so yes I will yes I did yes"
(1999, p. 244). It should thus come as no surprise that Heaven
and Hell interact in complex ways in The Ground Beneath Her
Feet, culminating in a vast show in "which the audience
was nightly bombarded by incessant images of heaven and hell .
. . and it was up to each individual to decide which images were
celestial, which infernal" (1999, p. 558).

As in much postmodernist work, fiction and fact blend freely
in The Satanic Verses, and some of the book's defenders
have been naïve or disingenuous when they claim that the
problem is a simple category error. The view that "Fiction
is fiction; facts are facts" is attributed in the novel to
the altogether unreliable Billy Battuta (1989, p. 272). Rushdie
knows better. The continual interpenetration of fiction and fact
in the novel is one of those examples of "hybridity"
which, he tells us, "The Satanic Verses celebrates"
(1991, p. 394).

This is even more prominent in The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
where, for example, Ormus Cama reads

books by famous American writers, Sal Paradise's odes to wanderlust,
Nathan Zuckerman's Carnovsky, science fiction by Kilgore
Trout, a playscript-Von Trenck-by Charlie Citrine, who
would go on to write the hit movie Caldofreddo. The poetry
of John Shade. Also Europeans: Dedalus, Matzerath. The one and
only Don Quixote by the immortal Pierre Ménard.

(He must have relished that "one and only.") If these
writers created by Kerouac, Roth, Vonnegut, Bellow, Nabokov, Joyce,
Grass, and Borges have written Cama's books, then what is the
nature of Cama's world? In 1971, he glimpses a bizarre alternative
world in which, of all things, "John Kennedy got shot eight
years ago. Don't laugh, Nixon's President. East Pakistan recently
seceded from the union" (1999, p. 350).

The novel also merges elements of the old and the new. Spivak
has accurately observed that "Rushdie's staging of the author
is more recognizably 'modernist' . . . , not de-centered but fragmented
by dramatic irony. . ." (1990, p. 43). Indeed, in most matters
of form, style, and method, The Satanic Verses is a modernist
novel. Its postmodernism lies chiefly in its content. In some
respects, postmodernist form and content are antithetical. Radical
formal experimentalists, while not necessarily conservative in
their politics, are limited in their ability to communicate radical
content, since their content is subordinated and often partially
unclear. Writers who feel compelled to express radical political
and cultural positions, such as feminists, tend to use modernist
or earler forms. Rushdie is largely in this second group, although
he is able to take advantage of the growing acceptance and understanding
of postmodernist forms to incorporate elements of them without
losing his message. The writers of this past decade or so, such
as Rushdie and Kathy Acker, are the first ones able to do this.

The novel resolves the plot and characters in a satisfying
modernist, or even pre-modernist, manner, killing off those who
are in the way and bringing Saladin together with both his estranged
father and his Indian lover. On the other hand, it doesn't try
to resolve the issues (the content). These are not simply resolvable,
and, in any event, a novel is not simply a work of philosophy
or sociology. The novel presents the issues, in all their multeïty,
helping us to see them more fully than we usually can, and leaving
us to work on them.

A related issue which deserves more attention than it has so
far received is Rushdie's literary language. A deliberate choice
of language has created new possibilities for some twentieth-century
writers. Joyce, for instance, practically forged a language of
his own for Finnegans Wake. Beckett's use of his second
language surely helped him in achieving the extraordinary purity
and precision of his diction. Probably no writer evoked the Nazi
Holocaust in poetry more successfully than did Paul Celan, who,
coming from Czernowitz, "a crossroads of heterogeneous cultures,"
and living most of his adult life in Paris, was fluent enough
to write in French, Russian, Romanian, Yiddish, or Hebrew, but
chose to write in German, the language of the men who murdered
his family (Colin, 1991, p. xiii). Celan's "Todesfuge"
is made possible not only by the richness of German, but also
by the bluntness (as in "blunt instrument") of its sound,
which enabled Celan's chilling verse:

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts.

(Celan, 1983, p. 41)

Rushdie, who had other choices, has elected to write his novels
in English, "by far the most widespread of the world's languages"
(Wardhaugh, 1987, p. 128). Moreover, English, with its subtle
distinctions between words of Germanic and Latinate origin and
its incorporation of words from hundreds of languages, is arguably
the major language with the most extensive semantic resources.
English did not become such a successful lingua franca
(ironically enough) solely through imperial force, but also because
of its superb utility and flexibility. Indeed, the English literature
of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton did not achieve its eminence
only through individual genius, but also because of the splendid
resources of the language itself. I wonder whether any other language
could have supported an uvre with the verbal range of Shakespeare's,
and I doubt that a Finnegans Wake could have been built
upon any base other than historically receptive English.

But while the resources of the language remain unmatched, those
of English culture do not. Even among the high modernists, early
in our century, in the British Isles, the English masters of the
first rank, such as Woolf and Lawrence, were greatly outnumbered
by Irishmen and other colonials (e.g., Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, T.S.
Eliot, Hugh MacDiarmid, Dylan Thomas). By now, the rout is even
more overwhelming. In a later, postmodern twentieth century presided
over by the French-writing Irishman Beckett, Granta's "Best
of the Young British Novelists" issues have been filled with
names such as Salman Rushdie, Buchi Emecheta, Kazuo Ishiguro,
Hanif Kureishi, and Ben Okri. The Booker Prize, the most important
British literary award, may go only to a novel first published
in the U.K. and written in English by a citizen of Britain, the
Commonwealth, Eire, South Africa, Pakistan or Bangladesh. Even
within those limitations, of the past twelve winners, only three
were born in the United Kingdom. Narrowly-defined "English"
literature has been marginalized by the vitality of other post-colonial
English-language literatures, but those literatures in turn benefit
from the productive tension between their various cultures and
their English language. "Without Contraries is no Progression,"
as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell taught us. The blending
of the streams of story brings us newness. The Indian characters
of The Satanic Verses land (literally) in England, and
Rushdie's London English is continually enlivened with Hindi and
Urdu expressions, and the interplay contributes substantially
to the novel's vitality.

It is the multiform celebration of not just diversity but "change-by-conjoining"
which distinguishes The Satanic Verses from most of the
postmodernist literature which preceded it. Whether this will
ultimately be seen as a mere shift in the direction of postmodernism
or as something new which succeeds postmodernism can't be foreseen
at this point, since it depends upon what other writers and theorists
do in the near future.

Many of the best-loved and most respected works in the histories
of the arts were powerfully offensive and inundated with vituperation
upon their first appearances. The best place to turn for reminders
of this is Nicolas Slonimsky's marvelous Lexicon of Musical
Invective, where we find the early reviews of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony ("crude," "almost ludicrous"
[1969, p. 44]), Chopin ("The entire works of Chopin present
a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony"
[1969, p. 84]), Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto ("music that
stinks to the ear," "the most barbarous sort of Russian
nihilism," "repulsive" [1969, pp. 207-208, 323]),
and so on. Truly worthless work is, of course, attacked too, but
Slonimsky's hundreds of examples are nonetheless instructive.
Great art, by its very nature, disturbs people , and many people
can't tolerate disturbance. In this case, much of the value of
The Satanic Verses lies in its ability to make us question
our assumptions, and this will ensure it a long life.